Abstract:

European Commission founded projects address different aspects, individual and professional, individual and organizational, theoretical and practical, with short- and long-term visions, etc. As it is usual, project websites are one of the projects results, and are well known and established way of presenting information, notifying, dissemination and broadening the circle of interested public. They can have only basic role of project’s presentation, or they have more complex role (e.g. e-learning, training centre, discussion area, etc.) and they are maybe of assistance or a tool for achieving some other project results. Regardless of the website intention, anyone who wants to reach the widest possible circle of audience and also expand that circle, he/she must devote to production and maintenance of the website. First it is necessary to identify the purpose of the website, determine the target audience, prepare the content, and then appropriately produce the content (graphical, technical, corresponding programming logic, etc.) to produce the website.

In 2013 started the Leonardo da VINCI TOI Project STRENGTH (Structuring of Work Related Competences in Chemical Engineering), 2013-1-ES1-LEO05-66726. Main aim of the project is to map and describe “green abilities” in the field of vocational education and training for chemical engineering. Basically, project tends to provide enough information for people to improve their knowledge and skills and be more competitive in labour market or even innovate and start their own new challenges. In order to meet the main aim the project anticipated the project website as one of the mechanisms for end-users.

As stated before, the success of website is closely related to the needs and expectations of users. For this purpose, a survey about project website expectations was conducted. Although end-users are targeted users, survey was divided into end-users and project users as latter, especially the promoter, also have needs and expectations about project website. Project users decide which information will be published, available public or upon log on, they are managers of project website and information closely reflects their interests on the project. In rare cases, end-users are allowed to actively participate in managing the content or even the organization of information. In the first part of the paper, questionnaires in survey and results are presented and discussed, especially the discrepancies among project and end-users.

Substantial amount of questionnaire questions can be applied also to other project websites. By taking into assumption that needs and expectations of both group of users do not substantially differ in similar projects, we investigated 50 other random found project websites and what they provide for end-users. In the second part of the paper we present the analysis of these websites, discuss their organization and amount of information through results from the first part of the paper. Result is a critical overview of project websites and guidance information for future project websites or improvement of the existing ones.

Keywords:

Needs analysis, project websites.